Indian leaders get Marx refresher

Karl Marx, founder of modern Communism. Photo / Supplied.

India's Communist leaders are attending a refresher course in Marxist ideology as they struggle to retain popular support in niche regions across the country.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) or the CPM - possibly among the world's most successful leftists in electoral terms - regularly organises classes for beginners but now maintains that veterans will also be given refresher courses in Karl Marx's teachings and ideology.

"Everyone needs to be educated and re-educated. This is not a one-time affair, our understanding of Marxist ideology needs to be updated regularly," CPM general secretary Prakash Karat said recently.

"We decided that the leadership needs to renew its own understanding of Marxist ideology before it offers guidance to the cadre," he added, referring to the two ongoing five-day educational sessions that include lessons in politics, history and science.

This instruction comes at a time when the CPM faces internal strife over its ideological direction after losing 27 parliamentary seats in last year's general elections and coming down to only 36 MPs.

Its hold over eastern Bengal province, where it has ruled uninterruptedly for 33 years, is also becoming tenuous as the state readies for polls in early 2012.

Communists may be an anachronism across the world, but ever since India's independence from colonial rule 63 years ago they not only flourished but periodically emerged as a major political force affecting the future of the world's largest democracy.

Ironically, their role has remained at variance with their political muscle, principally because of their probity in increasingly venal Administrations and the minimalist lifestyle of their leadership and their erudition compared with the flashy and ostentatious existence of most other Indian politicians.

With 63 MPs the CPM and the Communist Party of India supported Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Congress Party-led previous federal coalition, which in retrospect performed comparatively better than its present corruption and maladministration-ridden tenure in which the leftists were in Opposition.

Other than Bengal, the CPM has also been in power sporadically in southern Kerala state and another small northeastern province bordering Bangladesh, duplicating Chinese-style reforms with minor concessions to modernity and free market principles.

Over years their leadership welcomed foreign investment, provided it locally augmented existing productive capacities, upgraded technology and generated jobs.

They believed no country could "quarantine" itself from the globalised economy but propagated market reforms with a human face.

But the CPM remains opposed to all forms of badly needed labour reform and leftist unions remain powerful across India.

In Bengal, for instance, Marxist-backed unions had virtually paralysed the state's industrial growth, forcing its once booming businesses and manufacturing units to either close or shift.

Militant trade unions also ensured the closure of numerous tea gardens across the province, plunging tens of thousands of people into poverty.

India's Communist Party - before it split in 1964 into the Marxists supported by Beijing and the CPI backed by Moscow - was the world's first democratically elected in Kerala in the 1950s.

This caused widespread alarm not only across the country but worldwide and led to the United States stepping up its covert, albeit obsessive, anti-communist drive in India.

The Communists also supported a former Congress Government in the 1960s, providing credibility to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's tottering Administration.